LizardTech Celebrates 20 Years in Business

SEATTLE — LizardTech, a provider of software solutions for managing and distributing geospatial content, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and reflects on how it all started with the introduction of MrSID two decades ago.

“This is such a huge milestone for our company,” said Jon Skiffington, director of product management. “20 years ago, MrSID revolutionized how imagery could be used in geospatial applications by making it possible to view large datasets right on the desktop. Since then, we’ve continued to improve the MrSID image format with support for lossless compression in MrSID Generation 3 and now support for multi- and hyperspectral imagery and alpha bands in MrSID Generation 4.”

To celebrate LizardTech’s 20th anniversary, the company is holding a contest asking participants to say a word or two about how MrSID has come to their rescue. Participants are asked to send in their recollection or tribute to celebrate@lizardtech.com by July 10th, 2012. Three winners will be selected at random, with the first winner to receive an iPad and the two runner ups to receive $50 gift cards to Amazon.com. The winners will be announced via Twitter at the Esri International User Conference in San Diego on July 24th.

Since the arrival of the file format, LizardTech has introduced other tools to help geospatial professionals in their everyday workflow. LizardTech’s geospatial line of products include GeoExpress software, which enables geospatial professionals to compress and manipulate satellite and aerial imagery; Express Server software for high-performance delivery and publication; and LiDAR Compressor software, which turns giant point cloud datasets into efficient MrSID files.